Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived_Short Stories

by Lily Tuck

  The guidebook would land under the mango trees, in the bamboo thicket and among the lianas that border the dirt road. Pages fluttering, a few might tear off: The palaces were built out of wood and have since disappeared; only the religious edifices built out of stone remain.

  Peter says that Angkor is made up from hard minerals in a paste of sand, and, since water dissolves this paste, Angkor will soon disintegrate. Peter should know; he is an engineer. He is building runways in a town in northeast Thailand on the border of Laos.

  Louse.

  Lay-oss, he corrects me.

  Yesterday afternoon, during the flight from Bangkok to Siem Reap, the plane strained and bucked through thick gray clouds. Most of the passengers got sick; even the pretty Thai stewardess got sick. Moments before we landed the sky finally cleared, and from the plane window, spread out below us I saw Angkor for the first time. I had had no idea that it was so large, so vast.

  Angkor has a system of canals and waterworks called “barays” that are as large as lakes, the guidebook says. The area is over two hundred square miles and once included six hundred monuments.

  I turn my head again to have another look. Now it seems as if the pedicab with my husband in it is catching up. The distance between us is only a few feet. I am able to read the time, upside down—nine-twenty—on the watch around my husband’s pedicab driver’s wrist. My husband is laughing as he waves at me in a familiar and triumphant way.

  Perspiring and stopping often to catch our breath, we climb the narrow steep crumbling steps that lead us up to the three terraces of Angkor Wat. Each step marks a stage in the solar cycle, and the terrace represents the tiers of the world, the guidebook says. I am in front of Peter, and, occasionally, to spur me on, he taps me on the behind.

  Don’t, I say. Stop.

  Giddyup. Peter taps me on the behind again harder.

  When we reach the top of the temple, we have a view of the countryside, which is made up mainly of stone ruins and jungle. The stone ruins look like large piles of bleached bones, and except for a broken tower here and there, the stone ruins form geometric patterns—squares within squares, within more squares. Rows of palm trees with their high arching leaves mark ancient overgrown paths while, all around, the water in the canals, the barays, lies stagnant and still. I see a man fishing from the bank of the farthermost canal like a distant mirage.

  The Thais sacked Angkor in 1431, Peter has the guidebook now. The Thais conquered the Khmers and took the women back as slaves.

  Slaves, I say. You’d have liked that.

  Yeah, Peter agrees as he puts his arms around me and draws me to him. He holds me so tight that I have trouble breathing. Leaning down, he kisses me on the lips.

  Peter, no, I say.

  Why? There’s no one around. Peter kisses me again. Hmm, good. Salty, he says as he kisses me on the neck.

  Peter, don’t, I say again. Later. Not here.

  I can feel him start to lift up the back of my skirt. I try to move but Peter is holding me around the waist and one of his legs is wrapped around one of mine. I feel him fumble with the elastic of my underpants at the same time as I can feel him get an erection.

  Quick, he says.

  You must be crazy. I manage to pull away from him. You want me to get pregnant?

  Even here at the top of Angkor Wat, there is not a breath of wind, not a hint of a breeze.

  Hot. With one hand, I make a fanning motion.

  Peter turns away and does not answer me right away. Damn right, he finally says.

  When we were first married, my husband wanted to make love every day—sometimes we made love twice or even three times a day—no matter where we happened to be: in the backseat of a car, on a blanket in a horse field, and once inside a closet, knocking over shoes. Now that we have been married nearly a year and Peter goes to the town in northeast Thailand on the border of Laos for a couple of days every week, he comes back tired, he says, and he makes love less.

  This last time when Peter came back from the town in northeast Thailand I went through all the clothes he had thrown into the laundry hamper. I took his khaki pants and turned the pockets inside out. A few coins slid out of one of the pockets; in the other pocket I found a matchbook—the matchbook cover advertised Le Bambou Bar—along with a few wooden toothpicks and a crumbled white napkin. Carefully, I unfolded the napkin—would I find a phone number? lipstick? dried semen? I found nothing. Next, I picked up my husband’s shirt. The shirt smelled of gasoline and sweat and of Peter’s deodorant. It was still faintly damp and there were yellowish-brown rings under the arms; Peter’s underwear was quite clean.

  Something shrieks as it flies high above our heads.

  What was that? In spite of the heat I shiver.

  Kingfisher, Peter answers.

  Who knows, I say. Maybe, it’s the reincarnation of King Jayavarnam.

  According to my calculations—his attempt now and the one last night don’t count—Peter has not made love to me in eight days, in over a week.

  On the way down the steep steps, I follow Peter. I also cling to what remains of the stone railing carved in the shape of a snake. My leather-soled sandals are slippery and, unaccountably, my legs are shaking.

  Along with me and my husband, there are two or three other small groups of tourists. One group is French, and I can hear their shrill voices long before I see them standing in front of a bas-relief which depicts Vishnu churning the sea of milk. La mer de lait, their guide explains—the ambrosia that bestows immortality.

  Im-mor-tel, a Frenchwoman in a red halter top repeats in a nasal voice and laughs.

  The Frenchwoman and Peter exchange a look.

  Last night when we checked into the hotel in Siem Reap we forgot and we left the window open and the light on in our bedroom, and when we returned from dinner our bedroom was filled with moths. Not just moths, I pointed out to my husband, but all kinds of flying insects I had never seen before. A lot of the insects were caught in the folds of the mosquito net that hung over our bed, and even after Peter shook the net out and turned off the light, they remained clinging to it.

  Don’t worry, the bugs are harmless, he said in bed, pushing up my nightgown.

  No, I said, pushing away his hand. My stomach.

  Your stomach? What’s wrong with your stomach?

  I don’t know, I answered, turning away from him. The noodles at dinner, maybe.

  As we reach the bottom steps of Angkor Wat, we meet a Japanese couple who are on their way up. The Japanese couple smile and move aside to let us pass.

  Near the entrance gate of the temple, a vendor is selling soft drinks. Half a dozen bottles of Coca-Cola and the orange drink Fanta are lying in a bucket of water. When I pick up a bottle out of the water, the water is warm. Hot, nearly. When the vendor offers me a straw, I shake my head. A bunch of flies are swarming on the rim of the glass that holds the straws.

  Sipping the Fanta straight out of the bottle, I walk beside my husband to the next site.

  Tonight, Peter, I tell him. We can make love in the hotel, tonight.

  Peter does not answer me.

  Two little boys are following us: Hello! Hello!

  Amelican!

  One little boy makes the sound of a gun going off—bang bang—the same sound in every language. The other little boy has something wrong with one eye; only the white part shows.

  In 802, King Jayavarnam II founded Angkor as the seat of his kingdom. Angkor comes from the Sanskrit word “nagara” which means “city”—I am reading aloud from the guidebook. Are you listening, Peter? In a singsong voice and mimicking an Asian accent, I begin again: Ankle koms flom se Sansclit wold—

  Yeah, sure. Bang, bang.

  By the side of the road, slim columns of red earth rise several feet high. They look like sculptures and are the homes of termite ants.

  Two rows of stone giants guard Angkor Thom, the capital of Angkor; the giants wrestle stone serpents in their arms.

  I’ll take a
picture of you, Peter offers.

  I straddle a stone serpent and put my arms around a stone giant’s neck. I kiss the stone giant on the lips.

  Great! Peter shouts. Again! This time a French kiss!

  Your turn, I say.

  Wait till I find another one of those dancing nymphs—what are they called?—the ones with the long skirts and naked tits.

  Apsaras.

  One day when I was not wearing a bra and, according to Peter, anyone who wanted to could look down my dress at my breasts, an insect of some kind—a bumblebee maybe or a big horsefly, I never found out which—flew inside my dress and, in my frenzy, I forgot that the zipper on that particular dress was located on the right instead of the left side, and I ripped the dress the whole length from the sleeve to the hem trying to get it off quickly. Peter, who was watching, said, it served me right for wearing a low-cut dress like that. Also, he said, it reminded him of a story he had heard once about a World War II pilot who had to parachute out of his plane, but it turned out that he was left-handed, so that by the time he reached the ground he had nearly eviscerated himself trying in vain to find the rip cord.

  Each of the fifty towers of the Bayon is topped with four huge smiling heads. The heads have big lips and their smiles are full of mystery. The heads are supposed to represent King Jayavarnam, but they are too beautiful, I think. King Jayavarnam, I read in the guidebook, was a leper and became king only in his late sixties.

  All of a sudden, as I am looking up at the huge heads, I feel dizzy. Nauseated, too. Except for the bottle of Fanta, I have not drunk or eaten anything since the noodles at dinner yesterday—not even the glass of weak tea that was left in our hotel bedroom which I used instead to brush my teeth. I sit down. I put my head between my knees the way I know people who feel faint are supposed to.

  I have been careful—the one time, on a trip to Chieng Mai, I forgot to bring along my diaphragm and we had sex, Peter came in my mouth instead—and I always use some form of protection, but should I get pregnant here Peter has promised me that I can go home. I can stay with my parents, he has said, and wait there for the baby. Sometimes at night, after we have finished making love and Peter has already turned over and I can hear him snoring lightly and I am too hot still and cannot sleep, I try to imagine that the geckos I hear crawling on the window screens are crickets. I try to imagine that the frangipani tree outside the bedroom window with its cloying, too-sweet blossoms is the sturdy maple tree in my parents’ garden. I try to imagine what it would be like to sleep under a warm goose-down quilt in a single bed again, what it would be like to feel cool, cold even. But trying to imagine this always defeats me.

  What are you doing anyway, Anne? Peter asks. He is frowning. He is sitting on top of a fallen pillar, and has taken off one of his sneakers.

  Nothing, I answer.

  I got bitten by something, he says. He holds up his foot to me. See. It hurts like hell, he says. A red ant.

  Maybe the ant is the reincarnation of King Jayavarnam—I start again.

  Anne! Do you mind shutting up about King Jaya-what-his-face? It takes only a dozen or so of these ant bites to kill an average-size man.

  Hotter.

  A blue butterfly hovers and alights for a moment on one of the stone head’s big smiling lips.

  Him! I think.

  As we are leaving Angkor Thom, I look over my shoulder.

  Can you quit that? Peter says. You’re giving me the creeps. The next temple isn’t far. Just over there.

  The path has turned into an overgrown track full of ruts; in some places we have to walk single file. I try to stay within Peter’s diminishing shadow; I try to step on his back, on his head.

  I don’t know. It looks kind of deserted here. What’s it called? I ask as I look up the site in the guidebook.

  Preah Khan.

  Preah Khan? The guidebook says that Preah Khan is not one of the restored sites, I tell my husband. Preah Khan is an unrestored site. I don’t see anyone else going there, I also tell him. I’m worried—

  Anne, that’s your trouble. Peter stops for a moment and puts his arm around me. Relax, will you.

  I shrug his arm off.

  During my junior year abroad, I went to Normandy with a boy named Jean-Claude. Jean-Claude and I took the train from Paris to Cherbourg, and there we rented bicycles. We planned to cycle along the coast, camp out in farmers’ fields, and look at the beaches. The first day, on Omaha Beach, we clambered on top of an abandoned rusty tank, then Jean-Claude climbed down inside one of the bunkers. I remember how I would not go with him, I said I was afraid of a live grenade still. Jean-Claude stayed in the bunker for such a long time that I began to worry about him. When, finally, he emerged, we walked back up the beach to where there was a monument. The monument was in the shape of an obelisk and was set on top of some granite steps; the granite was warm from the sun and we sat down. Also, by then we were hungry. Jean-Claude and I opened our backpacks and spread out the salami, bread, cheese, and wine we had bought for lunch. After we had eaten the bread, salami, and cheese and drunk the wine, we lay down on the steps and Jean-Claude began to kiss me. I closed my eyes and I still remember how Jean-Claude’s kisses tasted of warm red wine, rust, and the sea. Then, just as Jean-Claude was starting to unbutton my blouse, I heard someone run up the granite steps and yell at us: Mais, alors! N’avez vous aucun respect pour les morts!

  The Gate of Victory, the name of the gate through which we enter, is surmounted by a tower with four more smiling heads of King Jayavarnam. A banyan tree has grown over the tower and a tangled network of roots and branches have completely encircled the huge stone heads—breaking off a nose, mashing an ear, blinding an eye, turning the smile of the old leper king into a sneer.

  Look, Peter points. You can see the brick underneath the sandstone. You can see the original corbeling.

  Inside the unrestored temple, we have to step over fallen lintels, stones, pillars. Another banyan tree has spread its roots, cracking the floor, toppling the roof.

  See the original what? I ask, as a troupe of gibbons leaps into the branches directly over our heads; the gibbons shake the foliage and chatter down at us: Whoop, whoop, whoop.

  Something small and hard hits me on the cheek.

  Hey!

  Then more nuts start to rain down, hitting me and my husband. Peter leans down on the ground and picks up a handful of nuts; he starts throwing the nuts back at the gibbons.

  Goddamn monkeys! he yells.

  On the way back to Siem Reap in the pedicabs—this time the drivers are pedaling slowly and not racing each other—we suddenly hear yelping. The yelping comes from the bamboo thickets and lianas that border the side of the road and to me it sounds pitiful and like a baby crying almost.

  Stop! I lean forward and tell the pedicab driver. Arrêtez! We have to stop!

  Likewise, my husband motions to his pedicab driver and we both get out of the pedicabs.

  Be careful, I say.

  Our drivers do not appear concerned; my pedicab driver is cleaning his ear with his fingernail—the pinkie fingernail grown long expressly for that purpose.

  Oh, God! As if to stop me, my husband holds out his hand.

  What is it? I ask.

  It takes me several seconds to understand what I am looking at: two mongrel dogs are stuck together. The male dog is making awkward plunging motions while the female dog has gotten herself grotesquely twisted around and is being dragged along on her bony back; between her legs, what is visible of the male dog’s penis is a glistening bright red.

  Once again, I feel dizzy. I can taste the Fanta rising up in my throat.

  In their frenzy, both dogs are also biting at each other. The female dog, the dog that is being dragged on her back, I notice, has bitten herself. Her tongue is full of little marks, little bloody tooth marks. The yelping, we heard, however, has stopped.

  Dream House

  Sometimes Isabel dreams she goes back to a house she has never lived in or set
foot in. Yet the moment she opens the front door, the moment she enters the front hall, everything seems familiar and, in the dream, she feels enormous relief. They are back together again. For a trial period. Her former husband is very subdued, he does not shout or tell stories in his booming loud voice; when he kisses her he kisses her on the cheek, not on the mouth. Also, he does not make any sexual advances. It is she now in the dream who flirts with him. When she speaks to him she puts her hand on his arm for an unnecessarily long time, she bumps into him accidentally-on-purpose with her hip; she sighs a lot, she leaves the top buttons of her blouse unbuttoned. In bed, she turns from side to side dissatisfied and unable to go to sleep while, next to her, her former husband lies flat on his back and snores evenly, peacefully.

  The first house Sam and Isabel lived in together was not a house but a boat. A thirty-four-foot ketch named Eudora. They had planned to sail around the world or cross the Atlantic Ocean but they only got as far as the Caribbean where they stayed a year, island hopping and living the ideal, dreamed-of, carefree life: cooking fresh-caught fish, eating fresh-picked fruit, every day wearing the same clothes—Isabel wore a bikini bathing suit, if the wind picked up, she put on a T-shirt. Every day, too, they dove off the deck of the boat and swam for hours in the warm aquamarine water. At night, they made love rocking to the motion of the boat at anchor and listening to the slap-slap sound of the waves against the boat’s hull; if it got too hot down below, they slept on deck under the stars whose names and positions in the sky Isabel got to know by heart.

  They were fortunate too, they never got into really bad weather—a few sudden tropical squalls that made the boat heel way over and the keel shudder and groan and that caused all the gear that was not tied down or not put away to roll noisily to the floor. One time when they were sailing around the island of Puerto Rico, they got becalmed—the sea was full of floating bunches of seaweed, the reason perhaps the motor did not start—and for a while they drifted so close to the coast that Isabel claimed she could identify, with her naked eye, the laundry hanging out to dry in someone’s yard: “Mira, mira,” she sang out, “two pairs of jeans, four white shirts, two bras, one red blouse.”